Organizations Are Talking: Deirdre Boden and the Sequential Constitution of Institutional Order by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Organizations Are Talking: 

Deirdre Boden and the Sequential Constitution of Institutional Order (Revised)

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

1. Introduction: The Business of Talk

Organizations, Deirdre Boden insisted, are talking enterprises. Their reality lies not in charts or policies but in the communicative work through which people coordinate, decide, record, and remember. Her deceptively simple proposition—that "talk is the business of organizations and organizations are the business of talk"—reversed decades of managerial and structuralist reasoning. Instead of explaining conversation by reference to pre-existing organizational structures, she demonstrated how those very structures are accomplished in talk. Through detailed conversation analysis of meetings, negotiations, and decision episodes, Boden revealed that organizational hierarchies, rules, and "policies" are not external frameworks but locally sustained achievements of members who orient to them moment by moment.

This "reversal of explanatory direction" marked a profound ethnomethodological move. Boden's The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action (1994) repositioned organization theory from the study of formal systems to the analysis of situated practices. She argued that the everyday coordination of meetings, calls, and reports constitutes the "micro-infrastructure" through which institutions exist. Organizations, she insisted, "are constituted moment to moment, interaction to interaction, day to day—across the durée of institutional time." In doing so, she bridged the gap between Sacks's "machine for producing orderly talk" and Hughes's "work of men and women." The result was neither management science nor abstract theory but a grounded sociology of organizational life.

Yet Boden's framework, for all its analytic power, contained an unexamined universalizing tendency. She wrote as if "the organization" were a singular phenomenon, as if the interaction order of institutional life operated uniformly across all bodies, all identities, all positions within hierarchies of power. What she could not fully see—constrained by her historical moment and methodological commitments—was that there is no single organizational interaction order. There are many, fractured along lines of race, gender, class, and institutional position. The moral demands placed on organizational members differ radically depending on who they are and where they stand in matrices of domination.

2. Biographical and Intellectual Trajectory

Deirdre Mary Boden (1940–2001) was a cosmopolitan intellectual whose life bridged art, business, and sociology. Raised in San Francisco and Dublin, she spent nearly two decades in the European film industry—first in Norway, later in London—producing award-winning documentaries before turning, in midlife, to sociology. That first career, grounded in coordination, aesthetics, and the orchestration of collective creativity, prefigured her later fascination with the organization of work. After earning her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied under Don Zimmerman and Harvey Molotch in the ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic milieu of Garfinkel and Schegloff, she completed post-doctoral research at Stanford. Boden went on to hold appointments at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Exeter, the University of Bologna, and ultimately the Copenhagen Business School, where she served as Chair in Communication from 1997 until her death in 2001.

Her academic career was brief but remarkably generative. The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action distilled years of analytic work on recorded meetings and negotiations, articulating a vision of organizations as communicative achievements rather than structural givens. She co-edited two landmark volumes—Talk and Social Structure (with Don Zimmerman, 1991) and Now/Here: Space, Time, and Modernity (with Roger Friedland, 1995)—each revealing her intellectual range: from ethnomethodology to modernity theory, from micro-analysis to global social forms. At her death she was completing Action in Organizations (Sage, unpublished), extending her analysis of "trust, proximity, and the business of talk" into the emerging world of internet industries. Trained in the ethnomethodological insistence on empirical accountability, yet alive to the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of everyday coordination, Boden embodied what she herself called "the business of talk"—a practice that connects moral imagination, communicative craft, and the social production of order.

3. Reversing the Direction of Explanation: From Structure to Action

Boden's intellectual project developed against the grain of 1980s organizational sociology. The field had become dominated by system-level models—structure, contingency, environment—that left little room for the study of situated interaction. Drawing on Garfinkel's program and Sacks's analytic machinery, Boden reversed the standard direction of explanation: rather than treating talk as an expression of underlying organization, she treated organization as an emergent property of talk. In her words, "structure is accomplished in the ongoing communicative work of members."

Her methodological commitment was to start from the middle—to observe the moment-by-moment procedures through which participants produce accountable action—and only then trace how these local practices laminate into the recognizable architecture of organizational life. Meetings, for Boden, are not reflections of an organization's hierarchy; they are the very sites where hierarchy becomes consequential.

This move parallels Anne Warfield Rawls' argument that the interaction order is sui generis—a distinct level of social reality that cannot be reduced to either individual agency or institutional structure. Both Boden and Rawls insisted that there is no "micro" and "macro" as separate analytic domains; rather, as Boden put it, "the world is of a piece, single and whole." The so-called macro phenomena of organizational life—hierarchy, authority, decision-making—exist only through the accumulation and lamination of local interactional practices. The organization does not exist "behind" the talk; it exists as the talk, unfolding turn by turn, meeting by meeting, across institutional time.

Yet where Rawls extended Goffman's insights by recognizing the plurality of interaction orders—showing that Black Americans and white Americans inhabit fundamentally different moral worlds with incompatible background expectancies—Boden's analyses remained largely within a single organizational interaction order. She documented how organizations are talked into being, but she did not pursue how different bodies, different identities, and different positions in institutional hierarchies experience radically different interaction orders within the "same" organization.

4. The Interaction Order as Moral Order: Boden Meets Rawls

Rawls demonstrated that Goffman's interaction order is fundamentally a moral order—a system of obligations that persons owe one another by virtue of co-presence, independent of institutional roles or cultural values. These obligations are constitutive: without them, there is no self, no meaning, no social reality. The interaction order consists of involvement obligations, face protection, and the working consensus that participants must maintain for selves to survive.

Boden's organizational analyses implicitly operate within this moral framework, though she rarely made it explicit. When she showed how meeting participants collaboratively close agenda items, negotiate turn-taking rights, or produce summary formulations that imply consensus, she was documenting the moral work through which organizational reality is sustained. Every "okay," every "so we're agreed," every ratification or withholding of response is a moral act—an assertion of or compliance with the obligations that make coordinated action possible.

But Rawls went further: she showed that the interaction order is not singular but plural, fractured along lines of race and power. Black Americans, she argued with Waverly Duck in Tacit Racism (2020), do not inhabit the same interaction order as white Americans. They live in a different moral world with different rules, different phenomenologies of danger, different obligations. What white Americans experience as neutral co-presence, Black Americans experience as surveillance and threat. The grandmother teaching her grandson how to survive a traffic stop is not teaching etiquette within Goffman's universal framework; she is teaching navigation of a racialized interaction order where "normal" rules apply perversely or not at all.

This insight transforms how we must read Boden's organizational analyses. The meetings she recorded, the negotiations she transcribed, the decision-making episodes she analyzed—all took place within organizationally situated interaction orders that were themselves stratified by race, gender, and institutional position. The symmetrical turn-taking, the collaborative closures, the mutual ratifications she documented as organizational accomplishments were available only to certain bodies in certain positions. For others—women managing interruptions and epistemic challenges, Black employees navigating white spaces, subordinates whose proposals require elaborate justification while managers' claims go unchallenged—the interaction order operates under entirely different moral demands.

5. Empirical Illustration: Closing the Agenda—But for Whom?

Boden's analytic brilliance lies in the way she translates abstract principle into empirical demonstration. Consider her analysis of how participants close items on meeting agendas. Agendas are commonly imagined as fixed scripts organizing discussion, yet Boden shows that they are resources participants actively use to manage accountability and authority.

A typical closure sequence begins when a participant offers a summary formulation—a compressed restatement of prior discussion that implies consensus ("So we're agreed to move ahead with option B"). Others ratify the summary through minimal response tokens ("Right," "Okay"), while another participant, often the chair, introduces a prospective indexical projecting topic shift ("The next issue is staffing"). If someone speaks after a closing-implicative summary, they must explicitly reopen discussion ("But wait—what about the budget implications?") or risk appearing to disrupt progress. Through these subtle moves, participants negotiate the boundary between "discussion" and "decision," demonstrating that an agenda item is not closed when the chair declares it so but when participants collaboratively treat it as closed.

Here, the organization's formal order—who decides, when consensus exists, when progress is legitimate—emerges through sequential work. The agenda functions less as a plan than as a shared interpretive device. Boden's analytic point is decisive: organizational control is exercised not through static structures but through the dynamic management of participation and accountability in talk.

Yet this analysis, as powerful as it is, raises questions Boden did not pursue: whose summary formulations carry enough authority to close discussion? Who can offer minimal ratification tokens without elaboration, and who must provide accounts? Who risks sanction for speaking after a closing-relevant summary, and who can reopen discussion as a matter of institutional entitlement? The sequential machinery Boden documents operates differently depending on the social identities and institutional positions of the speakers.

Carol Brooks Gardner's work on gender and "address rights" in public space revealed that women face constant violations of civil inattention—men claim entitlement to speak to women, to demand responses, to evaluate their appearances in ways that have no reciprocal equivalent. Candace West and Don Zimmerman's analyses of "doing gender" showed that women in meetings must manage interruptions, calibrate assertiveness to avoid penalties for being "aggressive," and perform emotional labor that remains invisible and uncompensated. These gendered interaction orders structure who can close agenda items, whose summaries count as authoritative, and who must navigate the meeting through entirely different moral obligations.

Similarly, Rawls and Duck's work on tacit racism demonstrates that Black employees operate within racialized interaction orders where every contribution is scrutinized differently, where self-selection at transition relevance places carries different risks, where challenges to white speakers' accounts can be read as insubordination rather than legitimate disagreement. The organizational interaction order Boden documents is not one order but many—overlapping, conflicting, unequally imposed.

6. From Goffman and Strauss to Boden: Completing the Circle—With Rawls

Boden's intellectual inheritance is unmistakably interactionist, yet her ethnomethodological discipline distinguishes her contribution. Like Erving Goffman, she treated institutions not as monolithic systems but as interactional orders sustained through face-work, framing, and participation management. Where Goffman mapped the dramaturgical and moral contours of interaction, Boden supplied the sequential machinery that makes framing empirically observable: who speaks, how turns are allocated, and how participation rights are claimed or denied.

Similarly, she shared Anselm Strauss's view of organizations as negotiated orders—arenas of ongoing coordination rather than rigid hierarchies. But whereas Strauss's analyses relied on retrospective ethnographic accounts, Boden provided the missing procedural specification: negotiation as turn-by-turn accomplishment. Proposals, counter-proposals, formulations, ratifications—these were not abstract "processes" but sequentially organized practices through which institutional life proceeds. In this sense, The Business of Talk delivered what Strauss proposed but never executed: a micro-analytic account of negotiated order in real time.

Yet both Goffman and Boden, despite their insights, universalized the interaction order. Goffman wrote about "the interaction order" as if civil inattention, face-work, and involvement obligations operated uniformly across all social positions. Boden wrote about "the organization" as if the sequential machinery of meetings functioned identically for all participants. It was Rawls who corrected this universalizing tendency by showing that the interaction order is plural—fractured along lines of race, gender, class, and institutional power.

Rawls' insight completes what Boden began. Organizations are indeed talking enterprises, but they are talking different languages depending on who is speaking. The "business of talk" operates through multiple, stratified interaction orders, each with its own moral demands, its own dangers, its own possibilities for recognition or annihilation.

7. Talk-Text Laminations and the Ecologyof Organization

One of Boden's most enduring insights is that talk is rarely self-contained. Meetings generate minutes, memos, and emails; those texts, in turn, circulate to shape subsequent talk. Her analyses anticipate what later scholars would call laminated ecologies—chains of interaction linking speech, writing, and technology. For Boden, the organization exists not in any one modality but in the lamination across them: the meeting that authorizes the report, the report that structures the next meeting. In this sense, she prefigured workplace studies and ethnographies of infrastructure that treat documents, databases, and screens as active participants in organizational life.

This layered vision of organization dissolves the micro/macro divide. The "macro" exists only as the sedimented accumulation of local communicative acts; the "micro" draws its intelligibility from reference to that sedimentation. Boden thus transforms the very ontology of organization: it is not an entity but a temporal achievement—talking, writing, and recording woven into durable forms.

Yet here too, we must ask: whose talk gets textualized into organizational memory? Whose contributions appear in the minutes, and whose are erased? Who authors the memos that shape subsequent meetings, and who must respond to directives authored by others? The lamination of talk and text is not neutral—it carries forward and institutionalizes the asymmetries of the interaction orders within which it occurs. When a white manager's off-hand comment becomes official policy while a Black employee's detailed analysis remains unrecorded, we see how talk-text laminations reproduce racialized organizational orders across time

8. Power, Accountability, and the Critical Turn

Boden's analyses reveal power not as abstract hierarchy but as distributed through interactional rights: who may summarize discussions, whose accounts go unchallenged, who must request the floor versus who can simply take it. By tracing these asymmetries in the procedural organization of talk, she demonstrates how domination operates through ordinary coordination. The authority of managers, the subordination of staff, the legitimacy of decisions—all are maintained through recognizable conversational machinery.

In doing so, Boden opened a pathway toward a critical ethnomethodology: analysis that remains endogenous to participants' methods yet makes inequality witnessable in empirical detail. Her work shows that moral order is not imposed from above but accomplished in practice. Every "okay," every "so we're agreed," every withheld response participates in the reproduction—or contestation—of institutional power.

Yet Boden's critical potential remained largely unrealized in her own work. She documented the interactional machinery of organizational power but did not fully theorize how that machinery operates differently across bodies and identities. She showed how organizations are talked into being but not how different organizational orders are imposed on different organizational members.

This is where Rawls' framework becomes essential. By recognizing that interaction orders are plural and stratified, we can extend Boden's program into a truly critical organizational analysis. We can ask: how do racialized interaction orders structure who gets heard in meetings? How do gendered interaction orders determine whose proposals are taken seriously? How do classed interaction orders shape who must justify themselves versus who speaks with assumed authority? The sequential machinery Boden documented becomes the site where organizational inequality is accomplished, reproduced, and potentially resisted.

9. The Plurality of Organizational Interaction Orders

Recognizing the plurality of interaction orders transforms how we understand organizational life. The "same" meeting involves radically different interaction orders depending on participants' social positions:

For white male managers: The organizational interaction order operates much as Boden described it—turn-taking is relatively symmetric, proposals are heard, summary formulations carry authority, and the working consensus sustains their faces. This is the privileged interaction order, the one that appears "normal" because it aligns with institutional power.

For white women: The organizational interaction order requires constant management of gendered asymmetries—interruptions must be navigated, assertiveness must be calibrated to avoid penalties, emotional labor must be performed invisibly, and contributions must overcome presumptions of lesser competence. This is a gendered interaction order operating within the organizational frame.

For Black employees: The organizational interaction order is structured by racialized surveillance—every contribution is scrutinized for "attitude," self-selection must be carefully timed to avoid being read as aggressive, and challenges to white colleagues' claims risk being heard as insubordination. This is a racialized interaction order where the "normal" rules apply perversely.

For women of color: The organizational interaction order involves navigating intersecting systems of domination—simultaneously managing gendered expectations and racialized surveillance, with neither framework adequate to capture the unique moral demands imposed. This is an interaction order structured by what Patricia Hill Collins called the matrix of domination.

For lower-status employees generally: The organizational interaction order is structured by asymmetric accountability—they must justify proposals that managers can assert without elaboration, must request permission for actions managers perform as entitlements, and must produce deference displays that superiors need not reciprocate. This is a classed interaction order embedded in formal hierarchy.

These are not variations of a single organizational interaction order. They are distinct moral worlds, each with its own rules, its own phenomenology of danger, its own obligations. Boden's sequential machinery operates within all of them, but it operates differently, producing radically different organizational realities for differently positioned members.

10. Decision-Making Revisited: Whose Decisions?

Boden's treatment of organizational decision-making illustrates both the power and the limitations of her approach. She rejected the dominant view of decisions as singular moments or discrete events, identifying instead the sequential and interactional nature of decision-making: "Piece by piece, moment by moment, stage by stage and level by level, decisions are discussed, debated, diffused and ultimately resolved."

This is a profound insight. Decisions are not "made" at a point in time but emerge through extended interactional processes. Yet we must ask: whose voices participate in this process? Who can introduce proposals, who can challenge alternatives, who can offer summary formulations that close discussion? The sequential machinery Boden documents is the machinery through which organizational hierarchy is accomplished—not merely reflected but actively produced through asymmetric participation rights.

When a manager says "So we're agreed" and others respond with minimal tokens, this closes discussion not because the manager has formal authority but because participants collaboratively treat the utterance as closing-relevant. Yet this collaboration is not symmetrical. Subordinates who continue speaking after such a summary risk being heard as disruptive; managers who do so are heard as providing necessary clarification. The "decision" emerges through interaction, yes, but through interaction structured by multiple, overlapping, unequal interaction orders.

11. Institutional Talk and Multiple Moral Demands

Boden's focus on organizational meetings connects to the broader ethnomethodological literature on "institutional talk"—courtroom proceedings, medical consultations, news interviews, emergency calls. These settings involve speech-exchange systems structured for institutional goals, systems that regularly override the moral obligations of ordinary conversation by interrupting, silencing, objectifying, and coercing participants.

Yet even within these institutional framings, different participants face different moral demands. In courtroom interaction, as Maynard and Manzo showed, defendants must navigate an interaction order structured by extreme power asymmetries—the judge controls turn allocation, objections can silence them mid-utterance, and even the timing of their gaze can be read as insubordination. But these asymmetries are intensified for Black and brown defendants, who face not only the institutional interaction order of the court but the racialized interaction order of American criminal justice—where their bodies are presumed guilty, their words presumed evasive, their silence presumed admission.

Similarly, in medical encounters, as Heritage and Maynard demonstrated, patients must navigate institutional interaction orders that grant doctors epistemic authority and control over topic transitions. But women patients face gendered interaction orders where their pain reports are discounted as emotional, their symptom accounts dismissed as psychosomatic. Black patients face racialized interaction orders where their pain is systematically undertreated, their concerns presumed exaggerated.

The institutional interaction orders Boden and others documented are real and consequential. But they operate differently—sometimes devastatingly differently—depending on the bodies and identities moving through them.

12. Limitations and Extensions: Toward Critical Organizational Analysis

For all its brilliance, Boden's approach faces constraints that become visible when read through Rawls' framework. Boden captured what is said but struggled with what remains unsaid—the pre-meeting exclusions, the uninvited participants, the unspoken hierarchies that structure who appears at the table in the first place. Her focus on recorded talk brackets the infrastructural dimensions of inequality: the hiring processes that determine who enters the organization, the promotion systems that determine who advances, the informal networks that determine who gets mentored.

More fundamentally, Boden's universalizing tendency—treating "the organization" and "the meeting" as singular phenomena—prevented her from seeing how organizational interaction orders are plural and stratified. She documented the sequential machinery through which organizations are accomplished but not how that machinery operates as a site of racialized, gendered, and classed domination.

Extending Boden's program requires integrating Rawls' insights on plural interaction orders. This produces what we might call Critical Organizational Analysis: an approach that maintains Boden's commitment to sequential rigor while recognizing that:

1. Organizations contain multiple, overlapping interaction orders structured by race, gender, class, and institutional position.

2. The sequential machinery Boden documented—turn-taking, summary formulations, agenda management—operates differently across these orders, producing asymmetric participation rights and unequal access to organizational voice.

3. Organizational "decisions," "policies," and "structures" are accomplished through interaction, but through interaction that systematically privileges some voices while marginalizing others.

4. Power in organizations is not merely hierarchical (managers over subordinates) but intersectional (operating through race, gender, class, and other systems of domination simultaneously).

5. Critical analysis must remain endogenous to participants' methods—documenting what they observably orient to—while making visible the patterns of inequality those methods produce.

13. Multimodality and Embodied Organization

Recent workplace studies, building on Boden's foundation, have extended organizational analysis beyond talk to encompass the full multimodal ecology of institutional life. As Oshima and Asmuß argue in their introduction to "Mediated Business," organizational work involves not only talk but embodied action, material artifacts, spatial arrangements, and temporal rhythms. The organizational interaction order is accomplished through gesture, gaze, body positioning, manipulation of documents and screens, and movement through architectural space.

This multimodal turn enriches Boden's program, but it also reveals another dimension of plurality: different bodies have different multimodal resources and face different multimodal constraints. A manager's expansive gestures claim space and authority; a subordinate's contracted posture displays deference. A white employee's casual body positioning signals comfort and belonging; a Black employee's carefully calibrated comportment manages the threat of being read as "aggressive" or "out of place." Women's bodies in organizational spaces are subjected to evaluative male gaze in ways that men's are not, structuring how they can move, gesture, and occupy space.

The organizational interaction order is not only talked but embodied, and bodies are not neutral vehicles of communication. They carry histories, trigger racialized and gendered readings, and face differential scrutiny and constraint. A truly critical organizational analysis must attend to how the multimodal accomplishment of institutional life reproduces—or resists—systems of embodied inequality.

14. The Informal Organization: Where Inequality is Negotiated

Boden focused primarily on formal organizational encounters—scheduled meetings, planned negotiations, institutional decision episodes. Yet as Fayard and Weeks, González-Martínez, and others have shown, much organizational life occurs in informal spaces: coffee breaks, corridor conversations, lunch room gatherings, spontaneous office visits. These informal encounters are not peripheral to organizational order but sites where hierarchy, alliances, culture, and identity are continuously negotiated.

It is often in informal spaces that the plurality of organizational interaction orders becomes most visible. In the formal meeting, participants must maintain the working consensus, collaboratively uphold institutional framings, and perform roles appropriate to the official setting. But in the corridor after the meeting, away from management's gaze, subordinates may express frustration, challenge decisions, and build oppositional alliances. Black employees may gather in spaces where they can drop the hypervigilance required in white-dominated meetings. Women may commiserate about the interruptions and epistemic challenges they face.

These informal interaction orders are not merely "backstage" to the formal organizational "frontstage." They are parallel organizational realities where alternative moral communities form, where resistance is organized, where the costs of navigating dominant interaction orders are shared and collectively managed. A critical organizational analysis must attend to these informal spaces as sites where plural interaction orders are most explicitly negotiated.

15. Conclusion: Boden, Rawls, and the Promise of Critical Interactionism

Deirdre Boden's The Business of Talk remains one of the most compelling demonstrations of how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can illuminate the lived reality of organizations. By showing that structure, authority, and coordination are communicative accomplishments, she dissolved the micro/macro opposition that long divided sociology. Her legacy lies not only in her analyses of meetings and negotiations but in her demonstration that rigorous empirical work can coexist with moral and theoretical imagination.

Yet Boden's universalizing tendency—her treatment of "the organization" and "the interaction order" as singular phenomena—limited the critical reach of her project. It was Anne Warfield Rawls who provided the theoretical correction Boden's work needed: the recognition that interaction orders are plural, fractured along lines of race, gender, class, and power. What Goffman and Boden described as "the" interaction order is actually multiple interaction orders—overlapping, conflicting, unequally imposed on differently positioned members.

Integrating Boden and Rawls produces Critical Interactionism: a synthesis that unites ethnomethodology's evidential precision with symbolic interactionism's moral and political scope, and extends both through recognition of plural interaction orders. This framework maintains Boden's commitment to documenting how organizations are sequentially accomplished while revealing how that accomplishment systematically privileges some participants while marginalizing others. It preserves Rawls' insistence on the moral character of the interaction order while showing how those moral obligations are differentially imposed and unequally binding.

For contemporary sociology, this synthesis points toward organizational analysis that is:

- Empirically rigorous: Remaining faithful to participants' observable orientations, documenting the sequential machinery through which institutional life proceeds.

- Critically engaged: Making visible the patterns of inequality that sequential machinery produces, showing how race, gender, and class structure organizational interaction orders.

- Pluralistic: Recognizing that organizations contain multiple, overlapping, conflicting interaction orders rather than a single universal order.

- Constitutive: Understanding that organizational hierarchy, authority, and structure are not pre-existing contexts for interaction but ongoing accomplishments of interaction.

- Morally accountable: Attending to how involvement obligations, face protection, and the working consensus operate as sites where domination is reproduced or contested.

Organizations are indeed talking enterprises. But they are talking different languages, operating through different moral orders, imposing different obligations on different bodies. The business of talk is not neutral coordination but the continuous, contested, unequal production of institutional life. Boden showed us how to analyze the sequential machinery of that production. Rawls showed us that the machinery operates through plural, stratified interaction orders. Together, they point toward a critical organizational analysis capable of revealing how power, inequality, and resistance are accomplished in the moment-by-moment work of institutional talk.

In Boden's work, the organization is not a static system but an ongoing conversation: one in which power, responsibility, and recognition are continuously produced. In Rawls' extension, we see that this conversation happens in multiple registers simultaneously—some voices amplified, others silenced, all navigating interaction orders that are separate and profoundly unequal. The promise of Critical Interactionism lies in making both dimensions visible: the sequential accomplishment and the plural stratification, the micro-machinery and the macro-inequality, the talk that constitutes organizations and the bodies that must navigate them.